NASA has launched a never-before-attempted mission to stop its Swift telescope from crashing back down to Earth – using a flying robot the size of a fridge
NASA has sent a spacecraft into space to catch a falling telescope
A daring mission has been launched to catch the Swift observatory before it burns up upon re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. Such a feat has never before been attempted and if successful will see the car-sized observatory dragged back up to its safe orbit at 373 miles.
Swift is unique in that it can detect some of the most powerful explosions in the Universe back at the dawn of the cosmos. Attempting the grab-and-drag without damaging or destroying Swift is a LINK spacecraft robot about the size of a fridge powered by small thrusters.
If the three-armed spacecraft launched on Friday can successfully grab it, it opens up the possibility of rescuing other key satellites – such as the iconic Hubble Space Telescope – and saving hundreds of billions of pounds.
NASA commissioned private firm Katalyst Space Technologies to build the spacecraft and carry out the mission. Its chief executive Ghonhee Lee said: “This is a high-risk, high-reward mission. The biggest danger was always we don’t launch anything and we let Swift burn up in the atmosphere.”
Increased solar activity has pushed out the Earth’s atmosphere so that it has been grabbing at Swift, slowing it down and gradually lowering its altitude. The last two years has seen its descent speed up and it now orbits at around 220 miles. Without action it will explode in October.
Bad weather and technical issues caused a series of last-minute launch delays before the Link spacecraft was finally launched from the Marshall Islands in the Pacific on Friday. It used a Pegasus rocket blasted off from the belly of a modified airplane and is on course to reach and take hold of Swift in about a month.
Dr Simeon Barber, a space scientist at the Open University, told the BBC: “The science community is hopeful about this because it’s an important telescope that enables us to study super high-energy phenomena that we have no other means to study.”
Swift, which hosts three agile telescopes, was launched in 2004 costing £220 million to study huge explosions like gama ray bursts and the violent deaths of stars. The rescue mission has cost Nasa £22 million.
Prof Barber added: “LINK will fire its engines to slowly raise the orbit of the telescope again to an altitude where it becomes stable for a long period of time. It will be a very slow, graceful lift, not a sudden boost to a higher orbit.”
If successful the next rescue mission could be to save the Hubble Space Telescope which is the size of a large bus.
John Nousek, a professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State University in the US, said: “The new ability to retrieve a satellite which was never planned to be serviced in orbit will give NASA or other customers the capability to reuse, extend or add functions to existing spacecraft at a small fraction of the cost of a new mission.”
Kieran Wilson, vice president of technology at Katalyst Space Technologies, said he hopes the Swift Boost mission will change how astronomers think about satellites’ lifespans.
